I have to disagree with your post. Sure, ShareThis might be tracking this data, but I love seeing the reports they generate. As a publisher and site owner, it is very important to understand where my content is going and what is being shared. If my visitors want to sign up for their free service, then even better because it will make their experience on my site better. I do agree though that the box loads a little slower, but I’m sure they are working on improving that. And, Sharethis should be the least of your worries. You might want to start worrying about Google and how deep they are getting into sites and users’ profiles.
@James B: Sure, ShareThis is certainly not the *most* of my worries. I also run my own mailserver, and don’t use Google Apps, for example.
But I also get the sense that people don’t understand the possible repercussions of letting companies all over the web gather and share their information. Yes, giving them this information enables services that are valuable — and the ShareThis reports are a good example of that — but they are not “free”.
I’ve read a lot of accounts recently about women who change their “single” status to “engaged” on Facebook… and are immediately flooded with ads for wedding-related services (even if that’s the *last* thing they want to see..). One woman in this situation was aghast, and set her status back to “single” to try to avoid the ads… only to have her friends and family suddenly concerned that the engagement was off. It’s messy.
ShareThis is on a much smaller scale, though I don’t know who they will partner with along the way, and what information they will share now or in the future with paying advertisers. Notice how the terms of service on their website (like many, many places) stipulates that the terms may change at any time without notice. Why do that? I run an online business — my privacy terms are clear, and I specifically say I’ll contact users and give them the chance to opt out if the privacy terms are going to change. It’s not hard.
But it’s not the end of the world, either way — if you know the price you’re paying (however vague that price may be) and it’s worth the service you’re getting, then good. If you don’t think it’s worth it (this is where I am) then I at least want the ability to opt out.
This post was about making it easy to opt out for those who want to.
Checked iBegin Share, and it looks quite nice. As far as I understand, it will not send information to any third party, and it logs only the pages that are being shared, but not any personal information (except IP address). Is that correct? It also is possible to translate it. And it is open source.
I had similar experience, the customized plugin worked fine except the error page.
I changed to iBegin Share, but it has problems with character encoding, so I would get back to Rob’s nice customized Share plugin, if there is a fix for that error message problem.
I checked into the error page problem and fixed it.
The bug is shared by all versions of ShareThis Classic — the plugin uses “wp_die()” as a way to return a status message to the user. It’s not intended to be used that way, but I also didn’t want to rewrite big chunks of the plugin to fix the bug.
Fortunately, wp_die() takes an optional “title” parameter, so it was a simple fix. I also fixed a bug I noticed in the current release of ShareThis Classic (a typo breaks the link back to the post).
To fix the bugs (this change is also added to the post above):
Search the plugin for this text: wp_die(__('Thanks
Then replace that line of code with this: wp_die(__('Thanks, we\'ve sent this article to your recipients via e-mail.', 'share-this').' <a href="'.get_permalink($post_id).'">'.__('Return to original page', 'share-this').'</a>.', 'Article shared successfully!');
Hello, I just want to completely remove the Sharethis widget but it seems something is preventing me to do that!!!
Firstly I deactivated the plugin, I still see the it’s icons be tailed on every post; then I went to the directory to delete the whole folder, the weird thing is those icons still appear!!! How come!
Can anyone tell me how to “completely” remove the plugin? Thanks.
For example if open this post then you will see at the bottom of the post there are two icons which used to belong to the ShareThis and should not appear here since I’ve already removed ShareThis.
Now I would say this plugin is just a evil, once you installed it, you can’t normally get rid of it. All my post/page now are infected with this evil, I have physically went into the server and deleted the plugin’s folder, why those icons still appear at the bottom of my post/page? Can anyone help? Pleassssssssssssssssssss.
@Crystal: those icons are showing up because of a DIFFERENT sharing plugin, called “Sociable”.
Delete that one if you don’t want to see the icons anymore.
I have to disagree with your post. Sure, ShareThis might be tracking this data, but I love seeing the reports they generate. As a publisher and site owner, it is very important to understand where my content is going and what is being shared. If my visitors want to sign up for their free service, then even better because it will make their experience on my site better. I do agree though that the box loads a little slower, but I’m sure they are working on improving that. And, Sharethis should be the least of your worries. You might want to start worrying about Google and how deep they are getting into sites and users’ profiles.
@James B: Sure, ShareThis is certainly not the *most* of my worries. I also run my own mailserver, and don’t use Google Apps, for example.
But I also get the sense that people don’t understand the possible repercussions of letting companies all over the web gather and share their information. Yes, giving them this information enables services that are valuable — and the ShareThis reports are a good example of that — but they are not “free”.
I’ve read a lot of accounts recently about women who change their “single” status to “engaged” on Facebook… and are immediately flooded with ads for wedding-related services (even if that’s the *last* thing they want to see..). One woman in this situation was aghast, and set her status back to “single” to try to avoid the ads… only to have her friends and family suddenly concerned that the engagement was off. It’s messy.
ShareThis is on a much smaller scale, though I don’t know who they will partner with along the way, and what information they will share now or in the future with paying advertisers. Notice how the terms of service on their website (like many, many places) stipulates that the terms may change at any time without notice. Why do that? I run an online business — my privacy terms are clear, and I specifically say I’ll contact users and give them the chance to opt out if the privacy terms are going to change. It’s not hard.
But it’s not the end of the world, either way — if you know the price you’re paying (however vague that price may be) and it’s worth the service you’re getting, then good. If you don’t think it’s worth it (this is where I am) then I at least want the ability to opt out.
This post was about making it easy to opt out for those who want to.
Rob – you should try out our iBegin Share tool (linked as my name). Fully open source, and comes with printing/pdf/Word doc support.
Checked iBegin Share, and it looks quite nice. As far as I understand, it will not send information to any third party, and it logs only the pages that are being shared, but not any personal information (except IP address). Is that correct? It also is possible to translate it. And it is open source.
Excellent post! Thanks!!
Hi, I have customized and used this plugin and working well. Thanks!
After a mail is sent, the page gets forwarded to an error page! Its the same way happening in your site also. See the title of the page.
Can you please share the idea to fix that?
I had similar experience, the customized plugin worked fine except the error page.
I changed to iBegin Share, but it has problems with character encoding, so I would get back to Rob’s nice customized Share plugin, if there is a fix for that error message problem.
Thank you very much for infu. The author RESPECT and uvazhuha.
I checked into the error page problem and fixed it.
The bug is shared by all versions of ShareThis Classic — the plugin uses “wp_die()” as a way to return a status message to the user. It’s not intended to be used that way, but I also didn’t want to rewrite big chunks of the plugin to fix the bug.
Fortunately, wp_die() takes an optional “title” parameter, so it was a simple fix. I also fixed a bug I noticed in the current release of ShareThis Classic (a typo breaks the link back to the post).
To fix the bugs (this change is also added to the post above):
Search the plugin for this text:
wp_die(__('ThanksThen replace that line of code with this:
wp_die(__('Thanks, we\'ve sent this article to your recipients via e-mail.', 'share-this').' <a href="'.get_permalink($post_id).'">'.__('Return to original page', 'share-this').'</a>.', 'Article shared successfully!');Cheers,
Rob
Hello, I just want to completely remove the Sharethis widget but it seems something is preventing me to do that!!!
Firstly I deactivated the plugin, I still see the it’s icons be tailed on every post; then I went to the directory to delete the whole folder, the weird thing is those icons still appear!!! How come!
Can anyone tell me how to “completely” remove the plugin? Thanks.
For example if open this post then you will see at the bottom of the post there are two icons which used to belong to the ShareThis and should not appear here since I’ve already removed ShareThis.
http://www.crystalsignature.com/2009/04/bangle-bracelet-step-by-step1/#more-160
Now I would say this plugin is just a evil, once you installed it, you can’t normally get rid of it. All my post/page now are infected with this evil, I have physically went into the server and deleted the plugin’s folder, why those icons still appear at the bottom of my post/page? Can anyone help? Pleassssssssssssssssssss.
@Crystal: those icons are showing up because of a DIFFERENT sharing plugin, called “Sociable”.
Delete that one if you don’t want to see the icons anymore.
thanks, your article is very informative.
Amazing .. very cool matter. I will write about it as well!
Great information is very interesting. I’m Kitty and learning SEO from New York.
nice wordpress theme – where can i get it? or it is selfmade?
Hello! The current theme is based on the (kinda out of date by now) Fauna theme, with various plugins added and some minor tweaks.
I keep looking for new plugins all the time for my website & have seen a lot of wordpress sites use ShareThis plugin, its been very popular.
thanks a lot for sharing this plugin and information man…